Archive for the ‘Hamilton Ontario’ tag

It’s the last place any Studebaker rolled off an assembly line, but after more than a year-long demolition effort, today only a fraction nothing remains of the former Studebaker of Canada plant in Hamilton, Ontario, remains after a developer has decided to turn the location into an industrial park.

While Studebaker’s main administration building and assembly plant in South Bend, Indiana, are slated for a full revitalization (and may qualify for National Historic Landmark status soon), the independent automaker’s Canadian home hasn’t seen the same fortune over the last few years, with all but 30,000 square feet of the 740,000-square-foot building – a section that pre-dates Studebaker’s tenancy – razed after years of indecision about what to do with the site and a few failed starts at revitalizing it.

Originally Constructed in 1941 by Otis Elevators and the Canadian government to build anti-aircraft guns for the war effort on a 7-1/2-acre plot of land in an already heavily industrial area on the north side of the city, the factory switched to auto manufacturing when Studebaker bought it in 1946, giving the company a second North American manufacturing facility outside of South Bend (Studebaker’s 406,000-square-foot Los Angeles plant had been in operation since 1935). By August of 1948, complete cars were rolling off the assembly line using a mixture of parts sourced from South Bend and parts sourced in Canada.

According to Patrick Foster’s Studebaker, the Complete History, the purchase of the Hamilton plant was part of Studebaker’s post-war strategy to take advantage of the seller’s market by boosting production, and that strategy seemed to work initially: 1948 proved the best year in Studebaker history in terms of production, revenue and profits, and in 1949 the company again broke its own records in all three categories.

Over the next couple decades, the Hamilton plant built Larks, Hawks, and some trucks (but no Packards), and Studebaker of Canada even got involved in distributing Volkswagens in Canada. The Hamilton plant eventually expanded over a 26-acre site, but with overwhelming competition from other compact car sellers – both foreign and domestic – and with a number of legacy costs mounting by the early 1960s, Studebaker management debated pulling the plug on its automotive operations.

It ended up doing so, but not all at once. While the company pulled out of South Bend in December 1963 (the Los Angeles plant operations ceased around 1956) and eliminated the Hawk, truck and Avanti lines at the same time, it shifted all Lark production to Hamilton, which Studebaker management believed could produce a maximum of 36,000 cars per year. Because Hamilton didn’t have foundry operations, and because South Bend no longer produced engines, Studebaker had to install Chevrolet straight-sixes and V-8s sourced from GM’s McKinnon Industries in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, and employment actually increased at Hamilton to pick up the extra work – from 700 to 1,100 people.

The Canada-only production plan wouldn’t last, though, with sales plummeting from 82,675 in 1963 to 46,460 in 1964, then to 19,435 in 1965 and 8,947 in 1966. Studebaker auto production would come to its ultimate end in March 1966 (sources differ on the exact date: It’s either the 4th, 5th or 17th according to Stu Chapman, the closing was announced on March 4 and the final assembly date was March 17), when a four-door Commander Cruiser rolled out the door. While at first glance it seems that Studebaker failed to keep automotive production going in Canada, some argue that Studebaker intended all along to wind down production as it did to avoid legal hassles with its dealership network.

A few years later, Otis then bought the assembly plant and used it until 1987; after that, a candy manufacturer moved in. It’s unclear exactly how long the site has been vacant, but as far back as the early 2000s proposals for use of the vast empty space have been floated, from municipal athletic fields to a film studio. According to reporting in theHamilton Spectator, the cost of cleaning up the contaminants at the site, estimated at about $10 million, has been in part to blame for those plans falling through.

In 2012, however, developer Sergio Manchia stepped in with a plan to rehabilitate the site into what he is calling Freeman Industrial Park, a plan that involved tearing down all but 30,000 square feet of the facility. What remains will become office space, “maintained to preserve some of the historical character of the building,” the Spectator wrote, while the rest will be cleaned up and divided into 22 industrial-zoned lots. Demolition took place in late 2012 and into 2013, and cleanup is expected to last until later this year.

“It’s not a quick process,” Manchia said, but he could see “some light at the end of the tunnel.”